The main research problem in this study was to identify strategies that could assist South Afrian companies in managing knowledge workers for their opt imal benefit . To achieve this goal, the following act ions were ta ken: Aliterature study was conducted to identify the best strategies that South African companies could use to manage knowledge workers for optimal benefit; Following the literature review interviews were concluded with key people in the human resource and recruitment industry to determine how a knowledge worker was defined in their organisations as well as to probe what management and human resources strategies were used to manage knowledge workers to their full potential; The interviews, in addition to the literature study, also served as a basis for a survey questionnaire, which was used to probe the views of knowledge workers to determine tools and strategies managers use to manage them. The empirical results from the study showed some concurrence with best strategies suggested from the theoret ical study. In essence, the study revealed that knowledge was well managed in the organisations where the study was conducted and that the knowledge workers were motivated and productive. However, it appeared that there was uncer tainty around the remuneration, rewards and recognition of these employees, which could ultimately reflect in less promising levels of commitment and lower levels of retention. The main findings were that: knowledge workers should be recognised for their good performance by providing financial incentives; knowledge workers should be provided with opportunities to continuously develop their competencies but be allowed to craft their own developmental experiences; knowledge workers should be empowered by delegat ing tasks to them that carry decision making responsibility and af fectinnovation; and Managers and knowledge workers should cont inuously have performance and organisational development discussions.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Graduate School of Management, 2004. / "December 2003". Bibliography: p. 210-272.

Human capital development is a prerequisite for a knowledge-based economy and for sustaining economic growth. Capability and capacity in the management of new knowledge and technology is determined by the quality of human capital. With globalization, Malaysia faces ever increasing competition in trade and investment. Therefore, the workforce will have to be equipped with a strong base in education and training. Efforts should, therefore, be made to ensure that the education and training system has the capacity to enhance the quality of intellectual capital as well as expanding the human resource base. In mainstream human capital theory, the basic principle is to measure the quality of human capital through some measure of educational achievement, such as years of schooling. It is generally assumed that more years in schooling improves the quality of human capital. Thus it is assumed by policy makers that an increased level of education will impact directly on labour market productivity. Concomitantly, policy makers argue that increasing the level of schooling will give an impact on wages. One of the obvious methods to assess the impact of investment in education is to calculate the rate of return to education. The overall impact of education on wages for society is described as the social rate of return and for the individual as the private rate of return. The major concern of this thesis is to assess the impact of investment in education on individuals. Thus I use a household income survey to estimate the private rate of return to Malaysian education from 1995 to 2004. A recent important strand in human capital literature is concerned with the role of education in emerging economies. This study is not as well established as in developed economies. Malaysia, as one of the High-Performing Asian Economies (HPAEs) over the past two decades, has experienced a steady growth with continuous improvement in the education system. Data and infonnation collected on Malaysian education and earnings serve to provide an important indicator of the benefits from investment in education for this important economy. Previous data and analysis on returns were hampered by relatively few observations and other data inadequacies. This thesis offers estimates based on a consistent set of household income surveys from 1995 to 2004. Thus, the estimation is more consistent compared with previous fmdings. Moreover, this thesis estimates the returns using both a standard and an alternative approach, i.e. Instrumental Variable (IV) that has never been applied to the Malaysian data. This is important because the latter estimation not only reduces the potential bias but also shows the impact of school reform on the returns. Additionally, returns to education using IV estimation are rarely compared between emerging economies and the developed countries. Such an analysis provides an indication of how important the human capital investment and educational reform have been at the current stage of development. Our results also provide new methodology for developing economies in estimating returns to education. The standard approach to estimating returns is based on homogenous returns to education - everyone gets the same return to the same qualification. Our results from this homogenous returns model shows the private rate of return to education in Malaysia is about the world average. However, endogeneity in schooling, omitted variables and other factors, such as ability will produce potential bias in estimation. The heterogeneous returns model allows for varying returns across individuals. This thesis clarifies differences in returns to different individuals. The exogenous impact in the Malaysian education system. i.e. the schooling reform is used as an instrument. The results reveal that the returns from IV estimation were higher than the standard approach. This result adds to literature by showing that OLS may underestimate the returns to education in the context of a developing country. The literature on rates of return paints a complex picture of the theoretical frameworks, methods and even results of such studies. Many of the benefits of education are not easily measured and are often not even recognized by rate of return studies. It is important for rate of return studies to acknowledge the methodological limitations and explain that rates of return are only an imperfect proxy to education benefits, which should ideally be used in conjunction with other measures of educational results.

Este estudo procura identificar, medir e avaliar as práticas dos empregadores do Brasil e do Canadá em relação à gestão do capital intelectual de seus desenvolvedores de software, comumente chamados de programadores. O trabalho condensa, através da revisão e análise dos principais autores do assunto, os pressupostos básicos da boa gestão do capital intelectual. Tais pressupostos foram determinados especificamente para os desenvolvedores de software, que são agentes nucleares na indústria da tecnologia da informação, tecnologia essa que é onipresente em todas as instituições modernas. A partir desses pressupostos básicos, foram definidos 13 Índices de Capital Intelectual, que possibilitaram a criação de um questionário eletrônico disponibilizado na internet, no qual profissionais do Brasil e do Canadá responderam após serem convidados através do disparo em massa de mensagens de e-mail, gerando assim os dados primários. Os 13 Índices de Capital Intelectual propostos são: Índice de Instrução, Índice de Treinamento, Índice do Sistema de Conhecimento Organizacional, Índice Ocupacional, Índice de Satisfação, Índice Motivacional, Índice Vocacional, Índice de Coleguismo, Índice do Poder de Decisão (empowerment), Índice de Contato Direto com Clientes, Índice de Rotatividade, Índice Hierárquico e Índice do Papel Contábil. Através de uma metodologia original proposta pelo autor, os resultados da pesquisa de campo, fartamente ilustrados com gráficos, mostraram que os respondentes do Canadá obtiveram melhor resultado em 7 índices, enquanto que os brasileiros superaram os canadenses nos demais 6 índices. / This study aims to identify, measure, and evaluate the practices of employers in Brazil and Canada in relation to the management of intellectual capital of its software developers, commonly called programmers. The study condenses, through the review and analysis of the principal authors of the subject, the basic assumptions of the good management of intellectual capital. These assumptions were determined specifically for software developers, who are nuclear agents in the information technology industry, the technology that is omnipresent in all modern institutions. From these basic assumptions, were defined 13 Intellectual Capital Indexes, which enabled the creation of an electronic questionnaire available on the Internet, in which professionals from Brazil and Canada responded after being invited through a mass e-mail sending, generating the primary data. The 13 Intellectual Capital Indexes proposed are: Education Index, Training Index, Organizational Knowledge System Index, Occupational Index, Satisfaction Index, Motivational Index, Vocational Index, Comradeship Index, Empowerment Index, Index of Direct Contact with Customers, Turnover Index, Hierarchical Index, and Accounting Role Index. Using an original methodology proposed by the author, the results of field research, fully illustrated with charts, showed that respondents in Canada obtained better results in 7 indexes, while the Brazilians beat the Canadians in the other 6 indexes.

A firm�s relationships with its customers contribute to its organizational capital and represent an important part of its shareholder value, so the nature of the value in these relationships needs to be understood well and managed carefully. Marketing managers therefore require techniques that will assess relationship value comprehensively in order to manage their portfolio of customer relationships effectively and in order to argue for a sufficient share of the firm�s resources to develop these market based assets for competitive advantage. At present, there is a well-established technique for assessing customer profitability analysis which assigns revenues, expenses, assets and liabilities to customers and algebraically sums their value to reach a profitability figure for each customer. However, even in its more sophisticated forms, the primary focus of customer profitability analysis as it is currently used tends to be the management of profitability by way of the management of existing situations, and particularly of cost, rather than the management of the value that is potentially available in the future from the intangible aspects of a relationship. Without knowledge of the dimensions of intangible value in the relationship, the technique is restricted to assessing those relationship aspects that can be easily quantified in dollar terms by the modification of existing accounting information. This leaves a gap in the available toolbox for managers in assessing relationship value, because much of the value of a relationship may be in its intangible aspects, which at present can not be readily assessed other than by a manager�s experience and intuition. In order to develop techniques specifically for intangible value assessment, it is necessary to understand the dimensions of this intangible value. Development of scales to measure the dimensions of this intangible relationship value and development of an understanding of its structure is thus a useful research goal, which is supported by calls in the literature for the quantification of market-based assets and their value Elucidation of the dimensions and structure of intangible relationship value is therefore the goal of this thesis. Although there are recent reports in the literature of studies that include the intangible aspects of relationship value, most of those that have been conducted in a business-to-business context appear to be primarily concerned with investigating the drivers of value rather than its dimensions, and those that deal with the business-to-consumer context describe techniques to assess the aggregated value of many consumers, rather than an individual buyer as is required for business-to-business applications. The thesis therefore proposes a conceptual framework, synthesised from the intellectual capital literature, which provides a set of six dimensions and a structure of intangible business-to-business buyer-seller value. The six proposed dimensions are unique in that they cover the human aspects of the relationship extensively. The thesis describes the testing of the proposed conceptual framework. This was achieved primarily by the use of the structural equation modelling technique on survey data that was collected from managers in the New Zealand manufacturing industry, following qualitatively analysed interviews with managers. The tests support the framework and its value dimensions. The thesis therefore concludes that this research provides a contribution to the literature on value assessment and that future research should be conducted to validate its findings.

This thesis contributes to the reporting of Intellectual Capital (IC) and includes four papers on the recognition and comparability of IC. IC, often called intangibles in the financial reporting discourse, reflects resources which create value in and for organizations. These resources originate out of human knowledge and capacities, which, through their uniqueness, can provide competitive advantages for an organization. As something intangible, IC is a challenge to report as it is not only a matter of reporting value that has been or can be realized but also a matter of reporting the creative processes focusing on present and future value. This challenge is a particular reflection of how and when to recognize IC as something reportable and is intensified if IC needs to be comparable. The thesis draws on the distinction that is made between mandatory and voluntary reporting when discussing recognition and comparability. Three of the studies relate to firms’ practices of reporting through annual reports. Since these reports contain both mandatory and voluntary sections, reflecting reporting both as a requirement as well as a possibility, different aspects of reported IC is emphasized. Using a wider range of documents, the fourth study relates to the enforcement of the mandatory reporting standards which the firms are required to apply in their reporting. As the overall finding in the thesis, three categories of recognition of IC are developed which reflect differences related to whether the reporting is mandatory, voluntary or, as this thesis argues, something in between. Reflected through the categories, comparability interrelates differently with recognition. The thesis contributes with the description of IC as a foundation for reporting which makes the matter of recognition of IC in reporting complex. It further highlights that through recognition of IC reporting is continuously expanding wherefore it is not possible to identify an end of an already expanded and demarcated reporting regime. In this expansion, by settling what is mandatory reporting through requested characteristics, voluntary reporting is defined.

In organisation, diversity in term of human resource is a new phenomenon which evolves and takes everyday more place in the global strategy of the company. For different reasons, human resource diversity could make the organization competitive in the market where the competition is all the time stronger. But the difficulties for human resource management officers is to elaborate human resource policies based on reaching the organization’s objectives and in the same time managing the workforce diversity in order to satisfy the all protagonists and in order to manage the diversity to make it a competitive advantage. They have to use appropriate tools in order to establish the employees’ loyalty and efficiency.

Today, companies are operating in a fast-changing environment of intense competition. It is essential that they continuously improve their competitive advantage by working hard to strengthen the soundness of their business systems, raise their competitiveness, and improve the quality of their manpower resources. The foundation of any company is its intellectual capital, and this has become an important direction in human resource development. This research paper aims at the relationship between intellectual capital and competitive advantage as well as the effect of innovation and service quality on intellectual capital and competitive advantage. It also examines the moderating effect of strategy on the relationships between intellectual capital, innovation and service quality. Finally, this paper offers some helpful observations and suggestions on how companies may raise their competitive advantage. This paper focuses on the banking industry. Two questionnaires were designed, one for supervisors and the other for consumers. For the former, random and convenience sampling were employed. Questionnaires were mailed to a random sample of 200 financial institutions in Kaohsiung and Taipei, of which 82 responded, a return rate of 41%. For the convenience sample, through the assistance of friends and relatives, a further 48 questionnaire replies were received. For the customer survey, the questionnaire targeted those banks which had already responded to the supervisor questionnaire. Each bank used convenience sampling methods to survey 3-5 customers at its service center. In total, 122 banks returned 573 valid questionnaires. The data from these questionnaires were subjected to a variety of statistical analysis including Pearson's correlation, independent t-test , ANOVA and regression analysis with the following results: 1. Intellectual capital has significant and positive influence on innovation. 2. Intellectual capital has significant and positive influence on service quality. 3. Intellectual capital has significant and positive influence on competitive advantage. 4. Innovation has significant and positive influence on competitive advantage. 5. Service quality has significant and positive influence on competitive advantage. 6. Strategy plays a siginificant moderator role on the relationship between human capital and innovation. 7. Strategy plays a siginificant moderator role on the relationship between human capital and service quality. 8. Innovation has a significant mediating influence on the relationship between human capital and competitive advantage. Keywords: intellectual capital, strategy, innovation, service quality, competitive advantage

Tez (Yüksek Lisans) - Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, İşletme Anabilim Dalı, 2008. / Kaynakça var.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Industrial Relations and Human Resources." Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-84).